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Monday, September 17, 2012

How to Gainfully Employ Music Vocab

Take it from an artist

Some
of our music-specific vocabulary is borrowed from visual art. Notice on the
vocab page how the flute’s melody is described as angular? Yet, music doesn’t
really have angles. In this case, the term comes from someone looking at the
printed notes and then visualizing what it would look like if lines were drawn
between each note. Music isn’t really chromatic or dynamic, either, at least
not in the same way as art. Some of the commonly accepted art music
classifications, such as baroque, impressionist, or minimalist, come from art,
too (and often don’t fit the music they label very well. But that’s a rant for
another day). The point is that when trying to describe or label an abstract thing, visual art already has some good solutions, so why not steal them?

When
writing about music, it’s good to follow the pattern of visual art reviewers,
too. When they are writing about a painting, they don’t simply describe the
art, for example: “It’s a painting of a clown with tears on its cheeks.” We can
see the painting, after all. We want to know why we should care about the
painting. Yet, having just encountered the bevy of specific vocabulary, in my
experience, students new to writing about music do just that—say what they
hear. A sentence might read: “The music begins with three flutes in duple meter
in a polyphonic texture.” They might feel proud, and rightfully so, because
they used new, difficult vocab. And while this might be a good description, the
burning question is this: why do I need to know this? I can hear the music,
can’t I? Descriptions like this don’t add meaning; they just are a written
simplified replacement for the audio. A written description might also act like
an arrow or a magnifying glass in art, drawing attention to some detail, but
there should be some purpose for this.

Build from the bottom up

Art
reviewers instead determine “Why does
the clown have tears painted on his cheeks?” or “How does the artist paint the tears,” or “How does that effect the way I interact with the picture?” The
descriptions, then, support general ideas. The same idea applies to writing
about music. Instead of writing “It is a scary piece with pizzicato violas in
triple meter,” answer a question such as “Why
did the composer write the piece in triple meter?” or “How and why does the
melody or accompaniment convey “scary”?” Then, use your handy written description
to prove your claim. It’s almost never good to start at the beginning of a
piece and describe what happens in each measure. Always work from a general
concept and then give specific supporting examples.

As in art, the most interesting parts of an art object
are usually the parts that are most
different. For example, if a painting is mostly dark, the important part is
probably where it’s light. In music, if there is a rhythm that recurs constantly
for the entire piece except for one section, that different section must be
important. “Why is it different,” ? There’s
probably not enough time or space to write about an entire piece of music from
start to finish, anyway, because often music is just too complex; a little music
is as good as at least 10,000 words. Instead, find the interesting sections of
music that prove your point.